Radiation expert Dr. Chris Busby says that huge quantities of radiation - 1013 or 10 trillion becquerels per hour - are still being released from Fukushima.
This is down slightly from some of the radiation levels observed in March but given that the Fukushima crisis has continued for months, Fukushima dwarfs Chernobyl in terms of radiation released.
Busby brought sophisticated radiation testing equipment to Japan, and says that the radiation from one sample from Tokyo was higher than existed inside the Chernobyl exclusion zone.
According to wide-spread but unsubstantiated rumors, Fukushima workers say that the ground under the plant has cracked, and radioactive steam is being released from the cracks.
And another interesting piece of news from the prestigious scientific journal Nature notes:
Shortly after a massive tsunami struck the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant on 11 March, an unmanned monitoring station on the outskirts of Takasaki, Japan, logged a rise in radiation levels. Within 72 hours, scientists had analysed samples taken from the air and transmitted their analysis to Vienna, Austria — the headquarters of the Preparatory Commission for the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty Organization (CTBTO), an international body set up to monitor nuclear weapons tests.
It was just the start of a flood of data collected about the accident by the CTBTO's global network of 63 radiation monitoring stations. In the following weeks, the data were shared with governments around the world, but not with academics or the public.
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